froghawk on 28/5/2016 at 14:54
Silent hill was dreadful
Nameless Voice on 28/5/2016 at 16:39
The only good thing about the Hitman movie was that it reminded me of how much better Dark Angel was, by shamelessly stealing footage from it instead of sticking with the proper origin plot.
The main thing that bugs me about video game films is that the games always seem to have better plots, or at the very least the films always tend to leave out the most interest bits of the source material.
Prince of Persia was okay, as was the first Tomb Raider film I guess, but they were very, very far from the source material. More like taking some random iconic thing and trying to build an entirely new world around that, while having nothing much to do with where they stole it from.
nicked on 28/5/2016 at 18:24
It's an impossible catch-22 though.
The fact that games are built around player interaction means that good video games don't need, and almost always don't have, a plot that is "good" by film standards. They develop character investment through gameplay, which is inherently untranslatable. And games that adhere closely to a more cinematic template, like Uncharted for example, usually have stories that, by the standards of cinema, are generic, cliche-ridden trash with paper-thin characters. Imagine sitting through just the cutscenes of Uncharted, how painfully dull that would be.
So you either end up with a film that is faithful to its source material and therefore flat, wooden and cliched, or you have a film that tries to build a workable plot from the barest of connecting elements, and ends up being dull and cliche-ridden anyway because it's not built on any solid foundation.
Of the videogame movies that are passable (and I still wouldn't rate any of them higher than 3 stars), those that follow the second route are usually the strongest.
P.S. Silent Hill was dreadful, if only for the wince-inducing "American" accent of Sean Bean.
Nicker on 28/5/2016 at 19:07
Very true, nicked.
In general it's a problem that Hollywood has when they put concepts and super-stars before stories.
voodoo47 on 28/5/2016 at 19:39
Quote Posted by icemann
Urgh is more the second one from what I've heard.
pretty much the same level of urghness.
icemann on 29/5/2016 at 06:43
Well he's at least more like he is in the games in the first, in the second one he's singlehanded taking on squads of troops out in the open. Totally agree on the Dark Angel stuff though. At the start I thought I'd accidentally opened up an episode of that awesome show.
On Silent Hill personally I very much enjoyed it, so each to their own :p. The second movie though is just crap.
Doom (the movie) has (
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-dMA8NmdyW4) one good scene in it and that's it.
froghawk on 29/5/2016 at 15:06
Silent Hill has a similar problem though... it randomly mashed up elements from the first 2 games, ignoring the symbology of all of it and making no attempts to reconcile it all into a cohesive story.
icemann on 30/5/2016 at 13:44
Well the only link to the 2nd game was Pyramid Head the rest was all from the first game.
Plot was the first games with some changes here and there.
